The Curve of Time
The Curve of Time, the title of the exhibition/series, is appropriated from the exquisitely written journal by M. W. Blanchet. This travel log, commencing in 1928, depicts a decade of summers spent cruising the British Columbia coast in a small gasoline-powered launch with her five children.
As a mother made sole provider by her husband's disappearance, living aboard the vessel allowed the summer rental of the family’s onshore home. Blanchet’s epic shifts seamlessly between the lyric and the domestic, a lucid picture of life afloat on complex tidal waters.
Coming across Blanchet’s book inspired my recent acquisition of a similar-sized boat to her eight-meter Caprice. The Gina Marie affords the option of cruising under sail.
My thoughts have returned from the far regions of the globe. If only in mind, I will cast off in the sea at the doorstep. The titles of my individual works will reflect the geography of the coast, of Blanchet’s coast, of a coast peopled for untold millennia in the curve of time.
Tom Burrows
December 2017
2018 Feb. The Curve of Time at Bau-Xi, Vancouver. Jedidiah, 24x24inches
2019 October, The Curve of Time at Bau-Xi, Toronto
2021 April, The Curve of Time at Bau-Xi Vancouver
A continuation of The Curve of Time series.
The work in this exhibition took form over the last year with my partner Gina in pandemic isolation at the Hornby Island studio. I began to construct the Hornby studio half a century ago on a 20-meter cliff facing south above the shoreline of the Salish Sea. It was never designed as a winter residence. During the more inclement months of the year, I had always found studio space elsewhere in urban centers that were better placed to interact in the necessary transactions to support my art habit.
It's been an invigorating winter season scrounging for firewood and patching leaks. The Southeast prevailing winter wind that the Hornby studio faces has an open stretch of the Salish Sea that flows uninterrupted down into Washington State. On a rare clear day, we can see Mount Baker. At times, the wind didn't drop below 30 knots for over a week. In any weather, the ever-changing light of the sea retained an ineffable presence.
In The Curve of Time, spring has arrived. Yesterday, the sea turned chartreuse with herring spawn. Time to steal moments to prepare our boat to launch.
Tom Burrows
March 2021
2022 April, The Curve of Time at Foster/White, Seattle.
The Curve of Time V
The work in this exhibition was produced during the second year of Decameron-like isolation with my partner Gina and a few friends on a small island in the Salish Sea. Very early in the summer of 2021, a searing heat dome hung over the island for days, emphasizing the presence of a record drought that by mid-August had lowered the local aquifer to the level that my pump failed. We had no water for the first time in fifty years on that island. A third of my planned studio production had to be abandoned. Luckily, we were spared most of the smoke wafting from the burning mainland forests as I fumbled about reconstructing the plumbing. By November, the highest recorded rainfall for that time of year had finally penetrated the heat-baked soil, and the aquifer began to rise. Water re-emerged from the faucets.
We live in a time of crisis. The sheltered interconnected seas and channels that line the North West coast from Puget Sound to Alaska offer protection from the vast powers of the open Pacific. If one attempts to read the everchanging light of that inner passage, its tidal surge, the spawn of its creatures, there is a possible solace.
The Curve of Time V (a series now in its fifth year) strives to portray the luminosity of those inner coastal waters in its subtle variance.
Tom Burrows
March 2022
2023 April, The Curve of Time at Vancouver Bau-Xi.
Potential in Lunar Cycles (a chapter in The Curve of Time series)
I spent my youth far inland from tidal waters. I had no comprehension of the energy contained in their lunar cycles until an incident that occurred while I was doing graduate studies in London.
Through fellow sculptor Jerry Pethick, I was invited on a weekend trip in an old 20-meter wooden North Sea trawler. The boat had recently been purchased by Jerry’s friend Tony, who was converting the trawler into a cruiser. The plan was to visit a small French port on the English Channel. About a dozen people involved would contribute a small sum for fuel and supplies. We were to meet at a pub next to Putney Pier, where the boat had temporary moorage 90 meters up the Thames River from Putney Bridge. The weekend voyagers arrived at the pub sporadically as Tony became increasingly agitated. Finally, he declared we had to embark immediately even though some of the party had not appeared. We hastily downed our pints while Tony untied the trawler's mooring lines.
It became apparent that we had to traverse a 25-meter-long arch through the width of Putney Bridge before the rising tide made the passage impossible and upset the carefully plotted weekend cruise. As we approached the masonry bridge, it seemed the trawler would pass through as we had more than a 30-cm clearance between the top of the boat and the rise of the arch. I was in the boat’s bow, looking downriver. We were about halfway through the arch when I saw the line of tidal surge approaching. The trawler came to an abrupt and grinding halt as the thickly planked roof of its wheelhouse jammed into the bottom of Putney Bridge. It splintered and collapsed as the tide continued to rise. We didn’t make it to France that weekend.
Later, as the wheelhouse was being rebuilt, to replace its shattered wooden hatch, I fashioned a translucent panel from glass fibres and resin. I witnessed the light that the panel defused, and it led through more than half a century of process to the work in this exhibition.
Tom Burrows
March 2023
2024 April, The Curve of Time at Bau-Xi Dufferin, Toronto - Video Tour Exhibition Notice
Into That Good Night (a chapter in The Curve of Time series)
December 28, 2023:
The electricity has just returned after a vicious Christmas day southeaster wreaked havoc on this side of Hornby, sending a heavy panel of tempered glass that sheltered the entrance to the house cartwheeling thirty feet to shatter on the paving stones by the gate. We were greeted with what seemed like myriads of diamonds on the path when we teetered home by the light of a cell phone from Christmas dinner with friends at a residence which was, luckily, on the island's northwest shore.
It's been reported that the Salish Sea is warming faster than the greater North Pacific.
M. Wylie Blanchet’s decade-long family travelogue, after the flu pandemic and an era of factional politics and market manipulation, commenced its nautical passages in 1928 on the eve of the Great Depression, while fascism gained a stranglehold throughout Europe and Northern Asia.
We are again emerging from a pandemic, but now, the curve of time and space is compressed in the ever-tightening vortex of mega-corporate media as we teeter on the lip of recession and fascism flourishes with the proliferation of populist demigods.
Hopefully, a voice will transmit a true journal of their family’s voyage; that anyone receives.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I have appropriated Dylan Thomas's lines, hoping to transfer rage from the death of the self to the demise of a global ecosphere that supports human existence.